Sources for America’s History: Printed Page 140
6-1 | | Democratic Spirit Empowers the People |
Instructions to the Delegates from Mecklenburg to the Provincial Congress at Halifax in November (1776) |
Just months following the Declaration of Independence, the citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, drew up instructions to guide those chosen to represent them at the Provincial Congress of the newly declared state of North Carolina. The Provincial Congress had become the governing authority in the state once the colony’s royal governor fled the previous year. Delegates to this congress ratified the state’s new constitution. The instructions to delegates reproduced below reveal citizens’ anxieties in this turbulent period of revolution. They also indicate priorities that emerged as ideas of proper government began to take shape.
At a general Conference of the inhabitants of Mecklenburg assembled at the Court-house on the first of November, 1776, for the express purpose of drawing up instructions for the present Representatives in Congress the following were agreed to by the assent of the people present and ordered to be signed by John M. Alexander, Chairman chosen to preside for the day in said Conference.
To Waightstill Avery, Hezekiah Alexander, John Phifer, Robert Erwin and Zacheus Wilson, Esquires:
GENTLEMEN: You are chosen by the inhabitants of this county to serve them in Congress or General Assembly for one year and they have agreed to the following Instructions which you are to observe with the strictest regard viz.: You are instructed:
1st. Political power is of two kinds, one principal and superior, the other derived and inferior.
2d. The principal supreme power is possessed by the people at large, the derived and inferior power by the servants which they employ.
3d. Whatever persons are delegated, chosen, employed and intrusted by the people are their servants and can possess only derived inferior power.
4th. Whatever is constituted and ordained by the principal supreme power can not be altered, suspended or abrogated by any other power, but the same power that ordained may alter, suspend and abrogate its own ordinances.
5th. The rules whereby the inferior power is to be exercised are to be constituted by the principal supreme power, and can be altered, suspended and abrogated by the same and no other.
6th. No authority can exist or be exercised but what shall appear to be ordained and created by the principal supreme power or by derived inferior power which the principal supreme power hath authorized to create such authority.
7th. That the derived inferior power can by no construction or pretence assume or exercise a power to subvert the principal supreme power.
The power of making laws
The power of executing laws and
The power of Judging.
A COUNCIL AND GENERAL ASSEMBLY.
And after the Constitution and form of Government shall be agreed upon and established [and] the General Assembly formed you shall endeavour that they may exercise the law making power on the following subjects of legislation (viz):
The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10, ed. William L. Saunders (Raleigh, NC: Josephus Daniels, 1890), 870a–870f.
READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
How would you summarize the type of government that the delegates were instructed to support? Why do you think the citizens of Mecklenburg County wanted the kind of government they described?
Did any of the instructions to delegates surprise you? How might you explain, for instance, the instructions related to questions of religion?